Safeguarding the Future of Food Security

The Guardian: Tucked away beneath the rolling Sussex countryside, crate upon crate of bloated, brown paper bags are piled high. Fastened with a clerical bulldog clip and neatly labelled, the unassuming exteriors belie their import. For within these bland wrappers are crucial tools for safeguarding our food security in the face of climate change, pests, population growth and disease: seeds.

But these are no run-of-the-mill offerings – they are wild, undomesticated relatives of 29 of our most crucial global crops, such as wheat, barley and maize. And they are about to be processed and stored within the sub-zero vaults of Kew’s millennium seed bank.

“Crop wild relatives are one of the solutions for future security as they provide the genetic material which can build resilience in our crop plants, making them more resistant to disease and better adapted to climate change,” says Jonas Mueller, international co-ordinator of the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, located at Kew’s Wakehurst site.

Collecting and preserving such seeds, he explains, is crucial because the modern cultivated crops we rely on have a very limited genetic diversity as a result of intensive breeding. “We call that domestication bottleneck,” says Mueller. The danger is that low genetic diversity in our crops has rendered our food supply vulnerable to changes in environmental conditions, onslaughts of pests and outbreaks of disease.

“History can teach us the lesson with the Irish potato famine,” says Mueller. “They only had a few varieties and then with the blight there were disastrous consequences. Had they cultivated a multitude of potato varieties they might not have come into such problems as there would have been a greater chance of one having a resistance to the disease.”

Such disasters are not just consigned to the past – plantations of one of our most familiar fruits are now in danger of being decimated. “The domesticated banana is just one variety, the ‘Cavendish’, and it is under threat from a new strain of Panama disease, a Fusarium wilt,” says Jonathan Jones , senior research scientist at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich.

Such risks are profound. A 2010 report co-produced by Kew estimates that 80% of our calories come from just 12 species of domesticated plant, while a study published in March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that although the range of crops contributing to each country’s food supply has increased over the last 50 years, the bill of fare in each country is becoming more similar. In other words, the global food supply is becoming more homogenous. As a result, seed banks are safeguarding our ability to feed the world.

But the clock is ticking. “It’s a race against time,” says Mueller. “Our research shows that 50% of all our target species are not properly collected and preserved in the seed banks, therefore [they] are potentially threatened.”

Launched in January 2011 and funded by the Norwegian government, the crop wild relatives project, entitled Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change, is a joint venture between the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. By providing partners, working on every continent (bar Antarctica), with a species list and collection guide, the hope is to gather around 20,000 seeds of each species. “In total we are talking about 450 species in 30 countries over the next four years,” Mueller says.

But the project goes far beyond simply hoarding genetic diversity. Once the seeds have arrived at the bank, researchers carry out a variety of germination tests to explore the conditions under which the seeds will sprout, as well as checking their viability and vigour.

They also ensure there is a pressed specimen of the plant in flower to record exactly what each paper bag holds. They then send out seed samples to researchers around the world who carry out further research to characterise the specific traits shown by the wild relatives, and set up breeding programmes to cultivate new crop varieties.

But that all takes time. “The whole process of incorporating traits from a wild relative and developing a new variety can take 10 to 15 years or even longer,” says Mueller.

There are, however, alternative ways to introduce desired genes from Kew’s cache. “You can either try to breed [a trait] in from a wild relative and that takes many, many years, at the end of which you may have linked to your gene a bad [version] of some other gene,” explains Jones, “or you can try to clone the gene you’d like with the useful property and move it from the species where you found it to the species where you would like it.”

Using such GM techniques, Jones and his team have recently reported success in producing potatoes resistant to late blight by introducing a gene cloned from a wild relative held in a Dutch gene bank. However, European Union regulations mean that the potatoes are unlikely to reach our supermarkets any time soon.

Jones believes it’s time the EU moved beyond a cautionary approach to GM. “That’s what’s clearly needed now to take advantage of all these opportunities we have to solve disease and other problems,” he says.

While seed banks offer one approach to global food security, the PNAS study also touches on the benefits of introducing lesser-known plants into our diet. It’s an approach organisations such as Crops for the Future(CFF), a body supported by the University of Nottingham and Biodiversity International, champion. “The major crops are good crops – if they weren’t they wouldn’t be there,” explains Sean Mayes, associate professor in Crop Genetics at the University of Nottingham. “[But] they are potentially not the only good crops.”

Looking at plants from around the world, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations together with the International Network of Food Data Systems, has already drawn up a list of more than 900 species it considers to be neglected or underused, although they may be popular in local regions. Bagging a spot on the list are fruits such as the viciously spiky and infamously pungent durian, popular in south-east Asia, the subtly flavoured yet refreshing dragon fruit and the zingy feijoa, which is already a favourite in New Zealand.

Aiming to carefully evaluate and produce quantitative data on the role such underused plants could play in areas including nutrition and food security, in 2011 CFF launched an independent research centre, backed by the Malaysian government (to the tune of nearly $40m) and the University of Nottingham in Malaysia.

“Wild relatives are one way to try to make wheat, or whatever major species it is, more resilient or use fewer resources,” sayes Mayes, who is also theme director for Biotechnology, Breeding and Seed Systems at the new centre. “But you are still very focussed on a limited number of of species and we think in itself that’s potentially a danger. We’re trying to find some plan Bs and Cs.”

While the centre is still being built, research has already begun. Mayes and his team are working to pinpoint specific problems, ranging from the need for drought tolerance to nutritional requirements, then identify plants that fit the bill. While it is early days, some matches have already been suggested. “Potentially we are trying to look at whether we can introduce [Bamara] groundnuts [grown in Africa] into southern Europe because the rainfall patterns predicted, and the the changes predicted in southern Europe mean there is going to be a lot more marginal land in terms of water availability,” he says.

But there are a number of issues the researchers need to resolve before they can achieve their aim of making such crops more widely used.

“If I double wheat yields in the UK through breeding, everyone knows what to do with that [crop], so the whole system, the processing system, commodities system, how it works, what properties it has, is already there,” explains Mayes. “It is much more difficult for a lot of the underutilised crops.”

Indeed, bringing an underused crop to an international market is fraught with issues, ranging from questions of breeding and crop yield to those of storage, transport, policy issues and even the problem of educating consumers about how to use it. However, neglected and underused crops could be more immediately helpful in safeguarding the food security of subsistence farmers, who depend entirely on their crops for nutrition.

“That’s fine in itself, it helps food security,” agrees Mayes. “[However] to get those minor crops more used, there has to be demand as well if they are ever going to be anything more than subsistence crops.”

But as the rise of the avocado has shown, the world may just have a taste for change.

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